Google Adsense 15th Anniversary

oogle has announced the 15th anniversary of Google AdSense, an advertising network that allows webmasters to monetize their online content, in a video posted on its official YouTube channel.

According to the latest figures from builtwith.com, there are now nearly 13 million active websites utilizing Google AdSense. Google’s parent company, Alphabet, posted revenues of $31.15 billion in Q1 of 2018, of which $26.6 billion was derived from advertising services.

Of the $26.6 billion amassed from advertising services, $4.6 billion was derived from displaying advertisements on partners’ websites.

Some websites have become renowned for generating large AdSense revenues. One of the most famous was PlentyofFish.com, one of the first free dating websites online, which was rumoured to be generating in the region of $500,000 per month from Google AdSense in 2006.

In its video titled “15 years of AdSense”, Google reminisces about the first ads served through AdSense, which were text only, and reflects on what is now the global popularity of the platform.

“Today, AdSense is truly global. Urdu, Japanese or French, we speak 45 languages and counting,” it says.

AdSense has launched a range of new features in recent months, including a new service titled AdSense auto ads.

Google claims that with Auto ads publishers can benefit from its machine learning technology. It states that ads will only be displayed when they are likely to perform well and that Auto ads will also “identify any available ad space and place new ads there, potentially increasing [publishers’] revenue.”

There are now also features available through AdSense that address some of the regulatory challenges posed by the EU’s ePrivacy Directive and General Data Protection Regulation.

Under AdSense personalized ads are the default option for publishers that enable the platform on their websites. However, according to Google’s policy pages, if a webmaster selects the non-personalization feature then visitors from the EU will only be served non-personalized ads.

While non-personalized ads don’t use cookies for tracking purposes, they still rely on cookies for frequency capping and to “combat ad fraud and abuse.” For this reason, serving such ads will still fall under the EU’s ePrivacy Directive (a new ePrivacy Regulation is expected to come into force in 2019).